Four Chicago Poems

Shine on, O moon of summer.
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
All silver under your rain to-night.

An Italian boy is sending songs to you to-night from an accordion.
A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next month; to-night they are throwing you kisses.
 
An old man next door is dreaming over a sheen that sits in a cherry tree in his back yard.

The clocks say I must go - I stay here sitting on the back porch drinking white thoughts you rain down.

      Shine on, O moon,
Shake out more and more silver changes.

Come you, cartoonists,
Hang on a strap with me here
At seven o'clock in the morning
On a Halsted street car.
 
Take your pencils
And draw these faces.
 
Try with your pencils for these crooked faces,
That pig-sticker in one corner -- his mouth -- 
That overall factory girl -- her loose cheeks.
 
Find for your pencils
A way to mark your memory
Of tired empty faces.

After their night's sleep,
In the moist dawn
And cool daybreak,
Faces
Tired of wishes,
Empty of dreams.

Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana
     town and dreamed of romance and big things off
     somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.
She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down
     where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun and
     when the newspapers came in on the morning mail
     she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all
     the trains ran.
She got tired of the barber shop boys and the post office
     chatter and the church gossip and the old pieces the
     band played on the Fourth of July and Decoration Day
And sobbed at her fate and beat her head against the
     bars and was going to kill herself
When the thought came to her that if she was going to
     die she might as well die struggling for a clutch of
     romance among the streets of Chicago.
She has a job now at six dollars a week in the basement
     of the Boston Store
And even now she beats her head against the bars in the
     same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place
     the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe
     there is
               romance
               and big things
               and real dreams
               that never go smash.

I am a copper wire slung in the air,
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing -- humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the shine drying,
    A copper wire.